How Important Is Physical Touch In A Relationship?

Related on TestTube:
The Neuroscience of Love
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Each week on TestTubePlus, we pick one topic and cover it from multiple angles. This series will be taking a deeper look at the science of love and human connection. Over these five episodes, host Trace Dominguez will be talking about how love affects us, the different types of love, and how people express love differently. So far, Trace has explained how the different stages of love affect our body and the difference between the love we feel for our pets versus the love we feel for our offspring. Today, he explores how importance of physical touch in a relationship.

Research from The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology suggests that staying in a relationship might be as easy as watching some silly romantic movies together. According to their study, couples that watched just three relationship movies in a month, and then talked about them, saw their rates of divorce fall by half, from 24 percent to 11 percent, which statistically is just as effective as couples therapy. A study published by Oxford University found that women are more likely than men to change their opinion of others after they kissed them. Researchers surveyed over 900 adults, asking them questions like, "How important do you think kissing is at the very initial stages of a relationship?" There are differences in romantic love between men and women: women rated kissing as all-around more important in relationships than men did.

These difference might be related to some fundamental differences between how men and women express their love. According to Dr. Gary Chapman, the author of popular relationship book "The 5 Love Languages", the five "love languages" are: words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch. This suggests that everyone may have their a "love language" of their own and expresses their love towards others in different ways. Recognizing this--that someone else's love language might be different from your own--might help people fall in love and stay in love, which is the topic we'll be covering in tomorrow's episode.

TestTube Plus is built for enthusiastic science fans seeking out comprehensive conversations on the geeky topics they love. Each week, host Trace Dominguez probes deep to unearth the details, latest developments, and opinions on big topics like boobs, porn, the ocean, stereotypes, fear, survival, dreams, space travel, and many more.

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